Pre-Squish There Was a Larger Difficulty Ramp and Plateau

Community General Discussion
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I was reading some of the many M+ posts, and I responded to several, and had some thoughts, so here is one more M+ Post.

After reading a bunch of thoughts, I was thinking about what made M+ feel better to me, pre-squish than post. Now this is just my opinion and take on it, and you can agree or disagree, but that makes it neither right or wrong. Just a take.

Pre-Squish, as we all know, there was a much less steep ramp in difficulty. There was less difficulty ramp, from key to key. That shallower ramp, eventually led to a point where you plateaued. This could be at +4, +6, +15, +24. That mattered on the skill and dedication of the player to reach their plateau of difficulty. Now players reach their plateau much much sooner.

Why does this matter? The feeling of progressing is important. At all levels. At the top, they are progging keys, to min/max their gameplay to be able to barely time the key. At the lower levels, it was just getting to a +10 or KSM. The point is, that you could incrementally increase that difficulty and feel like you are getting better little by little. At all levels. The dopamine hit of getting some more score, or timing a higher key, or just getting that little bit of progress happened over a longer period of time and a broader range.

Post-Squish, everyone reaches their plateau faster. The difficulty ramp is very steep, and from my experience, I hit my plateau for the patch very early on. I hit KSM on two chars, and got AoTC on two. I just dont have the time to invest in regular scheduled play, and pushing that higher end isnt what I enjoy. So in my case, I progressed my characters to where I normally do, quickly. And the difficulty ramp is much steeper, so progressing further is a greater challenge. So I have the options, to play alts, push higher, or play something else.

What I think a lot of people are experiencing, and why we are feeling like there is a lower participation rate, is that people are reaching their plateau, at all difficulty/skill ranges early, and arent progressing past them. And the ramp up to that next-ish level of difficulty/skill is a bigger jump. And getting over that hump can be discouraging.

Those middling key levels, where the difficulty ramp was shallow was, in my opinion a good thing. The better players could jump up the ramp in leaps to where they wanted to play, and the less skilled players, ie. me, could walk up that ramp, gradually increasing difficulties, making small gains and feeling like I am progressing. Now even if technically the progression is similar post-squish as opposed to pre. It doesnt feel that way. And feeling is what makes people play the game.

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I thought the difficulty curve was the same but they chopped off the button ten levels.

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The difficulty between heroic dungeons and keys was what got axed.

I would suggest changing the word “larger” to “longer”.

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^ This. They cut off the bottom half that a small minority of players did and just made m0 give as good gear as an m+10 used to.

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Heroics were brought up to old m0, m0 brought up to m+10.

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As a player who actually did a lot of heroic dungeons, I would dispute that claim. They say a lot of things. I didn’t observe that happening.

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Nearly 15% of all keys run during DF S2 were in that range. Now I have no way to determine how many actual players that represented, but I am not comfortable calling it a “small minority” unless someone has data on number of players within a given key range.

Note that the reason I looked up DF S2 is because it was the most recent season that wasn’t overly inflated (DF S3) that wasn’t going to have people farming +2s for valor.

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Higher io and more skilled players dont need lower keys, they just jump to higher keys…

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So you’re suggesting they abandoned people who ran low keys and new players who would never have an opportunity to progress because of the removal of starting progression? I agree, I think they did this. And part of it was a desire to turn mythic+ into a closed club.

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They already did in S4 DF… Lowest dungeon you can run now is an old 10

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The problem with this logic is that with old sub 10 keys going away, so did the loot they gave away too. So m0 doesn’t have as good as old m10 did, it just has m0 now. Old m10 is gone. The old reference point for gear doesn’t exist anymore, so all blizzard really did was make the game harder and tell people “well akshully m0 is like m10 was” to make people think it’s ok. And thusly here we are.

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In the reward range of keys level 2-20, only 15% of keys done were in half the range. That sounds like an unnecessary half to me.

Not true. You forget how wide a range m+ used to cover. The gear range is half that now, because m0s give what m+10s used to.

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Current m0s drop the same track loot that previous m10s and they don’t have a timer and they don’t have affixes. How is this harder

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So I just checked the data again, and I misremembered from a previous post; it was 29.2% keys run from 2-10 in DF S2. That isn’t just reward keys, that’s all keys. If we consider just reward keys, it jumps to 31.6% of keys. So just shy of a third of reward range keys were run at the levels that were removed.

27,230,415 total keys
25,122,570 reward keys
19,284,309 keys between 11 and 20
7,946,106 keys 10 and below
Source: raider.io

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“If you succeed at completing content that is 10 levels of difficulty harder than you are ready for, you will get better loot.”

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Saying m0s are as hard as m10s from previous seasons is a bit misleading. M0s are substantially easier and likely around the m4-5 area from previous seasons in terms of mechanical difficulty but you have unlimited time to finish them.

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That’s certainly an opinion. But we hear all the time from overgeared people that “X content is super easy because it’s easy for me in my raid gear”.

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Yeah mythics were so easy a lot people just skipped m0s entirely because you could go straight into m+ in heroic gear. Mythics are not hard, you just have to hit any buttons

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The thing is, though, a lot of players used those +5 keys. New characters would gear up, and established characters would farm crests. I think removing the bottom ten levels was a mistake.

I mean, a very small minority of players use 90% of the outdoor world zones. Hey, I have a great idea, let’s remove those old expansion zones from the game! The players don’t need them!